Lyrid meteor shower. Best seen from Europe, looking East. Up to around 20 meteors can be seen per hour. Best seen before dawn. Saturn is also having a close encounter with Earth. Bust your telescopes out! Mars is also view-able and should be good to view tonight.

russeler97

"The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface.

It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative"

I've obviously never been into space but I can relate to that feeling.

"The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface.

It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative"

I've obviously never been into space but I can relate to that feeling.

Reminds me of something similar.. I mean the profound effects space has on people..

There's this amazing short podcast of astronaut Dave Wolf recounting his first spacewalk....he describes how the shadows are the blackest, there's no reflected light if your arm goes in tot the shadow it disappears.

200 miles above Earth's surface, astronaut Dave Wolf -- rocketing through the blackness of Earth's shadow at 5 miles a second -- floated out of the Mir Space Station on his very first spacewalk. In this short, he describes the extremes of light and dark in space, relives a heart-pounding close call, and shares one of the most tranquil moments of his life...

...Out in blackness of space, the contrast between light and dark is almost unimaginably extreme -- every 45 minutes, you plunge between absolute darkness on the night-side of Earth, and blazing light as the sun screams into view. Dave and Anatoly were tethered to the spacecraft, traveling 5 miles per second. That's 16 times faster than we travel on Earth's surface as it rotates -- so as they orbited, they experienced 16 nights and 16 days for every Earth day.

El Dildo

Researcher have identified the furthest ever galaxy discovered in space - a staggering 13.3 billion light-years from Earth. The galaxy was observed around 420 million years after the Big Bang when the universe was just 3% of its current age. Astronomers have calculated the galaxy is a 13.3 billion light-years from Earth with a single light-year representing 5,878,625 million miles.

It was spotted using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Scientists say the object is in the first stages of galaxy formation with analysis showing it is less than 600 light-years across. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 150,000 light-years across with the Solar System a third of the age of the newly discovered galaxy. Astronomers spent months ruling out alternative explanations for the object’s identity - such as red stars, brown dwarfs, and red galaxies - to conclude it was a very distant and elderly galaxy.

I'm also amazed that the light can travel so far that's it's identifiable to us.

Unlike most everything else, light doesn't age. At all. Ever. It can get absorbed along the way, but if it makes it to us at all, it's exactly the same light that left its origin all these billions of years ago. The only other thing with this quality is gravity itself. Everything else is either confined or ages. Even neutrinos lose their flavor after a while.

I witnessed an iridium flare tonight! Was spectacular! It was completely by chance. I've been doing some long exposure time lapses out my back yard. I was setting my camera up, waiting for the moon to come in to frame for my shot. In the corner of my eye I spotted what I thought was a super bright star I hadn't noticed. It was about 23:45 so the sun was down about 1.5hrs and there is a full moon so the sky wasn't too dark. Anyway this bright "star" just got brighter and brighter and then disappeared. The sky was too light polluted for me to see satellite continue on or to see it move. It just looks like a star getting super bright then disappearing.

Iridium flares are bright reflections of sunlight off flat panels on Iridium communications satellites. For a brief period, they can reach magnitude -8.5, around 1000 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky. They are akin to someone shining reflected sunlight off a watch face straight into your eyes - only this time the "watch face" is a metre-wide flat metal panel about 500km above the surface of the Earth.

There is a possibility that it was a meteor coming towards me at such an angle that the trail was obscured but looking at videos of other iridium flares, I'm confident it was a light flare from a satellite. It all happened in about 3 seconds.

I found a video to show what it was like. It doesn't look like much in a video but seeing it yourself, it's pretty f*cking cool.

So long as the skies are clear, they should be visible throughout the northern hemisphere. The Meteors will come from the north but will be best seen in the east or west as they streak through the upper atmosphere.

Powerful telescopes won't be needed but binoculars will come in handy.

I was hoping to see some action tonight myself but it's still pretty cloudy. I have my camera and tripod, just in case. I can set the intervalometer on my camera to make 10 second exposures every 12 seconds. Bound to catch something if I leave it there long enough.

Neon_Dreaming

A new planet was discovered 11 lightyears from us. It has been called Ross 128b.

European scientists announced today the discovery of a world orbiting nearby star Ross 128. The planet, named Ross 128 b, has a predicted temperature range that could allow liquid water to exist on the surface. Ross 128 b is now the second-closest such world to Earth; only Proxima Centauri b, at 4.25 light years away, is closer.

The big question: Is Ross 128 b habitable?

A star's habitable zone is the region where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. Depending on the star's temperature, this region changes. In our own solar system, it's the area roughly between the orbits of Venus and Mars. But for cooler stars, even a close-orbiting planet could harbor water.

Ross 128 b falls into this scenario. The parent star is a red dwarf, meaning it's low in mass and barely half the Sun's temperature. Ross 128 b is 20 times closer to its star than Earth, taking a mere 9.9 days to complete one orbit. But the star's low temperature should give the planet a temperature between -60 and 20 degrees Celsius (-76 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit). That plausibly puts it in the habitable zone, but scientists can't yet pin down its vital signs with certainty.

Just being in the habitable zone, however, doesn't guarantee Ross 128 b is actually habitable. Many red dwarf planets are tidally locked, meaning one side gets continually baked in sunlight while the other remains cold. Neither condition is conducive to life.

Additionally, red dwarf "flare" stars like Ross 128 and Proxima Centauri periodically erupt showers of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which would be harmful to Earth-like lifeforms. But since Ross 128 is less active than Proxima Centauri, it is now "the closest known comfortable abode for possible life," according to the European Southern Observatory.

fashion

More black hole news. Scientists have observed for the first time ever that a black hole has "spit" something out. Not just once, two times in a row. This disproves the assumption we had that black holes can only swallow and not spit out.

AndyGanteks

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BöömBäpper

I don't know surely what I have seen, but is it really that easy to see satellites at night? Last summer i noticed moving dots in the sky at night.

There was no blinkin lights, engine sounds and they were very high so i don't think it was just planes. I have seen those dots since that maybe 40 times. One night I was looking one of those dots thinking its just plane but then big passenger plane came and looked completely differen't.

Begoo

I don't know surely what I have seen, but is it really that easy to see satellites at night? Last summer i noticed moving dots in the sky at night.

There was no blinkin lights, engine sounds and they were very high so i don't think it was just planes. I have seen those dots since that maybe 40 times. One night I was looking one of those dots thinking its just plane but then big passenger plane came and looked completely differen't.

I believe those are sattelites, just illuminated by sun from other part, not sure if its possible though. Could be also a meteor being visible too, who know's. I've seen them plenty of times, mostly in summer when its clear and almost no clouds in sky.

Anyway when i first time heard about biggest stars and found about UY Scutti and how it compares to rest of big stars especially our sun, my jaw dropped.